Fire hose’ drew snow into region

Channel 7 meteorologist Jeremy Reiner sounded a little down when he answered the telephone yesterday afternoon.

“I’ve had better days,” he said.

Forecasters knew for days the storm that dropped almost two feet of snow on parts of Worcester County on Thursday and Friday would be a noteworthy weather event, but they didn’t know it would go into the record books as one of the biggest March storms on record for Worcester.

Mr. Reiner said a low-pressure system several hundred miles south of Nantucket is usually so far away from Central Massachusetts that heavy precipitation wouldn’t make it here.

However, he said, a low-pressure area in the upper atmosphere heading southeast from the Great Lakes on Thursday night got absorbed into the main storm, giving it a boost of energy that intensified an easterly flow from the Atlantic Ocean.

That formed a meteorological “conveyor belt” of moisture that combined with colder-than-expected temperatures to bring more than the anticipated snow to the area.

“Think of it as a fire hose from the Atlantic,” he said of the “conveyor belt.”

Channel 5 chief meteorologist Harvey Leonard said in weathercasts Thursday and Friday that deep Atlantic Ocean moisture played a key role in burying Central Massachusetts in snow.

A strong high-pressure area in the North Atlantic kept the storm from moving out to sea at the rate most storms do.

He said the storm stalled, causing heavy snow to fall on the area for more than 18 hours.

“We were not in a good spot for it to get stuck,” Mr. Leonard said.

A subtle wind shift also was a major factor in the severity of what Charles Foley, a meteorologist in the Taunton office of the National Weather Service, termed a long-duration storm.

Mr. Foley said the wind late Thursday night shifted from the northeast to the north-northeast, allowing colder air to filter into the region from the north.

The geography of Worcester County also contributed to the heavy snowfall, Mr. Foley said.

Worcester’s hilly terrain caused the air to be cooler than many other areas, something that is common with March storms, he explained.

Plus, the moisture-laden winds from the ocean bumped into the Worcester County hills and lifted upward, causing even more moisture in the form of heavy snow to be released. In the world of meteorology, that is called orographic lifting.

“The orographic lifting probably played a role in the heavy snow you got in Central Massachusetts,” AccuWeather.com meteorologist Thomas N. Kines said.

Mr. Kines acknowledged forecasters were surprised by the amount of snow that fell in Worcester County, and said temperatures about two degrees colder than expected were the main reason for such heavy snowfall.

“It was a pretty rare occurrence,” Mr. Kines said of the storm. “We forecast up to a foot of snow in Washington, D.C., and while it snowed there it was 35-36 degrees and it didn’t stick. You got a lot more snow than we expected, and the temperatures made all the difference. It was a storm that was not well-behaved and had a lot of surprises.”